Krysia Jopek

[13 dancers: antigone, dora, elizabeth, hafiz, jackson, july, lily, question, second, thom, wind, zombie, zygote]

.the stage set for rearranging stories shuffles the decks of divination under your reclining leather seats..

.the set director may have lost his mind with all that climbing uphill to chart daylight

(and eavesdrop on the newly-unionized writers)..

.the dancers are murmuring secrets in a chain;

holding up the sky

for a coveted benediction..

.you should consult the appropriate manual for an orientation to the masquerade parade of shipwrecks,

ghost trains harboring war criminals..

the theatre’s floors of glass proliferates on the backdrop of video screen..

.all those TVs can be dizzying..

(.keep one foot on the floor..)

.don’t tell anyone what happened in the parking garage..

.interpretations shouldn’t ricochet..

.there’s shrapnel in your hair..

.there’s a game we’re playing that no one understands..

.in a future segment, expect the ice of winter with riddles underneath..

.now’s the time to silence your phones though it’s permissible to share videos on TikTok..

.we’re experiencing an over punctuation with the ego floating downhill

into a polluted mote of random kindnesses..

.the AI set designer’s architectural castle is constructed from stainless steel, celluloid, and cubes of glass..

.jesus sang and wept only once..

.judas hanged himself on a poplar tree while willows wept..

.prepositions fell out of parables..

.no one knew where to go until tomorrow..

.you mustn’t drink the water in the new city..

.don’t climb out of the strange memory of your skin until the chorus instructs—

or turn yourself inside out

unless someone is guarding you..

.you’ve been dreaming—

awakening one finger at a time into the moonlight at midnight..

.the place where you grew sharp stones

and couldn’t speak for years..

.now that we’ve gotten to know each other

we can look away..

.eye contact can be so draining..

.the dancers are getting ready in the green room—

reviewing lines that will change..

.templates were privy to the finest poetry, after all..

.some of the syntax-melodies might coalesce,

find themselves..

.someone else’s consciousness, a reprieve..

.blackbirds fly in sequences that shift the sky..

.the 60-year-old barn, a shamble of floorboards dismantled in the snow—

didn’t own an era..

.premise a: algorithms misfunctioned..

.premise b: needles in the muscles didn’t bleed..

.c: sky was tainted..

.d: no one acted appropriately until much later..

[2 dancers]

.how could anyone read the Room [that defies description]

that I had become, she said—

.vociferous blue jays in my head won’t leave—

their intricate nests take up memory..

.Monday subtracted Sunday’s stone altar in the forest cathedral light

where birches lean into pitches of sun too thin to adumbrate..

.everything hurts all at once..

.the spring flowers are singing, he said..

.singing daffodil yellow and hyacinth pink..

.the mourning doves collect our sadness..

[13 dancers]

.this morning, the song sparrow’s missing head..

.a delicacy for the coyote’s mouth..

.faded teal feathers hidden by dusty brown crinoline—taken, too..

.you said, let’s drive diagonally through crisscrossed streets..

.toward colors painting the sky-fall twilight—

a necessary thrill..

.the ghost of the house stole your newest watch..

.time isn’t helpful, she said..

.g minor is the saddest key because we’re digging a hole in the ribbon of woods’ dirt floor..

.the other birds watch the velour-blanket-shroud..

.it’s teal, one of us said..

.to match the feathers underneath..

[13 dancers]

.the singing sparrow, pregnant belly down, done for singing..

.the husband watching the nest he built out of habit..

.she wasn’t an omen, we wanted to convince ourselves..

.one of us said, we should bury her..

.another said, which one of us?.

.antigone longed to volunteer..

.the coyote mouth didn’t want her fluffed blue feathers underneath brown..

.keep the children next door away from what might be an omen; another of us posed the imperative..

.this narrative jettisoned for drinks on the House..

.weary of itself..

.fatigued for fatigue’s dark couch..

.distractions proved useful..

.art knocking on proliferating doors..

.one could say more..

.the Chorus commiserated..

.you shouldn’t read the process notes..

.that was before this doorway..

.pain knew itself but couldn’t abscond affirmations.

.no one genuflected properly..

.the singing didn’t have particles..

.the house peeling while we slept staggering..

.the violins moved [things—maybe us] horizontally..

.some feelings weren’t pliable..

.midnight might reset..

.don’t confess..

.you moved everything into the wrong places..

.your thoughts can’t fit in car rides..

.you shouldn’t ask questions that reside somewhere else..

.the wind took our kites to a different city..

.we sleep for days..

[4 dancers, antigone, dora, pluto, wind]

.let’s blow this place open..

.let’s sharpen all our charcoal pencils..

.love isn’t your tattoo..

.one of us said, the alphabet soup is getting cold..

.no one here speaks persian..

.the day has gone lazy while finding itself..

.were you able to memorize all your medical notes?.

.a motif fell out while you were coughing..

the kamancheh won’t share the constricting stage built for broken-hearted musicians..

.percussion has walked out..

.tell the children the lunch money absconded with dollhouses..

.explain to the media that an occupation is a war..

.yes, we’ve been here before—licking incisions with dollhouse sandpaper..

.our tragic hero completes the requisite paperwork in triplicate—

a triptych of despair’s paintbrushes..

.let’s call it, still life aliens..

.let’s call it, ancient abstract expressionism..

.why do you keep smelling when you know it all smells bad?.

.we’ll send a letter to your last known address if anything changes..

.in the meantime, reprogram the remote for your new kidney..

.in the meantime, ask the ghosts of the house to come back.

[2 dancers: dora & pluto]

.tell the blue birds and catbird that food assistance won’t compensate a new apple tree..

(.it wasn’t your fault..)

.the white and pink butterfly bushes and heliotrope—

for the swallowtails and monarchs..

.maybe: leave your wallet in the dirty public bathroom..

.someone will identity-theft you—

and your credit might resurrect..

(.who knows?.)

.no one asks anything of me, she said.

.either love—or don’t love., he instructed.

.it’s easier that way?, she asked..

.he twirled her like a classical ballerina on her bare toes..

.you should learn to ask for something worthwhile,

for the ash to be cleared from your lung,

the spinal fluid to cleanse itself and the brain—

the garbage to pay for itself..

.let’s play HATCH..

.not catch..

.let’s blow this place wide open..

[13 dancers: antigone, dora, elizabeth, hafiz, henry, jackson, lily, pluto, question, sam, thom, wind, zebra]

prolegomenon

*

.no more a tradesman of suitcases, you’re tracking pages with bone chips in velvet emerald satchels over your shoulder (dislocated by moonlight)..

*

.august found you trading your tickets to a broken opera for a stamp of disproportionate magic..

*

.(as if..)

*

.broken things are dangerous: the crystal wine glass under your bare foot,

the perfume-tray mirror thrown down cellar stairs..

*

.we watched you spinning all those chipped plates of glass and china (all at once),

toying with quantifying chaos stuck between streets of itinerants and fools..

*

.one of us: high-speed kaleidoscopic with a personality on crack—

or something such..

*

(.you know..)

*

.there’s really no reason to study for the astrological test..

.this is no prolegomenon for a misplaced cartography..

The garden, a micro-wasteland: cracked ceramic and glass; peat moss gone amok with ice, tangle, and quandary. Mourning doves thread dirges into blackbird noise; the blue jay cry, a semicolon.

Let’s pretend to be yellow, he said—the yellow of daffodils; we can somersault through crocus, primrose—without any definitions for sorrow.

I bought tickets for the monorail, she answered—so we can live inside a different city where pristine snow glitters under quaint streetlights, where passer-bys dream in poems without any answers.

I’m disappearing, he said—studying the palm and thin fingers of his left hand. When the ice shifts the sun, I can’t form human sentences, remember the passcode to myself.

Blackbirds are stuck in my throat, she answered—mourning doves nest in my unwashed hair. The blue jay is a semicolon between cities where I could have loved my breath on the mirror, your hand on proliferating, turquoise doors.

It’s true. I’m a con-Artist. I can’t pinpoint on the calendar the day–or on the wind-up clock, the hour this new identity coalesced, grew into its genetic paws. Strangely, I’m not one iota ashamed. I daresay I might be off-the-chart titillated by getting away with items at the bottom of the shopping cart I didn’t see when I checked out at the register with an AI-robot half-cloned from Mykie. I think but can’t remember; the driving away with my takeout food after presenting a dead debit card for payment; dining and dashing because of a make-believe emergency phone call about an ongoing, quite boring family crisis. And then there’s the overestimation of money needed for a sudden ridiculous, requisite expense for which my rich mother begrudgingly writes a check. Hey, I’m not a corporation. Well, at least not yet. Why does the sun cost so much? Isn’t rain free? Nope, nothing is free in America—no free lunch without strings attached.

Every story has a beginning, so I’m searching for point A. What was the first sign or premonition of this new fun game, one lacking conventional rules? I guess I was creating my moving red ethical line in the sand. There are those who follow rules and those who invent them, and I’m one of the latter, so I am being true to myself, and living a life well-examined. Even now, I’m gazing into my reflection in the picture window, searching for clues. Those new lines at my jawline, my sinking eyes—there are signs.

Perhaps I had been acting out beneath the surface of the days, turning my inner pain inside out away from my skin—or perhaps this is an attempt, ongoing, with proliferating layers and iterations leading toward an invented justification. For too long I was playing chess with existential demise, checkers with corporeality, chess with death. Yes, I’ve borrowed that dangerous game against The Angel of Death from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. My dreams are A Glass Darkly, also a Bergman film—but for me in black and white while my brain travels in color to stamp its passport: Iceland to see the Northern Lights, Cabo San Lucas, Florence, Nice, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, ancient Persia, Greece, Egypt. No one should blame my brain for my new existence as a con artist. It’s all on me, I can assure you. It was merely ART.